Guest Editorial: State must obey court ruling

Republican Abel Maldonado is making noise about running for governor on an anti-crime platform, believing Gov. Jerry Brown may be vulnerable on the mess that is the California prison system.

"The bottom line is that, under Gov. Brown, if you commit a crime you do less time. It's just catch and release," Maldonado recently told reporters. "Lives are at stake."

It's a bogus charge, and Maldonado knows it. Brown wasn't governor from 1982 to 2000, when the prison population grew by 500 percent. He isn't responsible for the overcrowded conditions that caused federal judges to issue yet another court order June 20, this one demanding California reduce its inmate population to 137.5 percent of capacity by the end of the year.

The governor knows he eventually will have to comply. He delays the inevitable and aims to place responsibility for any increase in crime on federal judges rather than himself or the Legislature.

But if voters want someone to blame, they should look in the mirror. They passed tough sentencing laws in the 1980s and 1990s but didn't want to pay enough to adequately house and care for the massive influx of druggies and Three Strikes offenders.

Spending more on prisons is not the answer. More money needs to go into education, drug and mental health treatment, and other crime-prevention programs to help young people and ex-convicts lead productive lives. But there's going to be a rough patch making this shift.

The California prison population hit an all-time high of 144,000 in 2006, while Maldonado was a state senator. The system's capacity was 84,000. Conditions were so bad inmates were dying needlessly at the rate of one per week.

Federal judges looked at the system in 2005 and declared it cruel and unusual punishment. Since then the state has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on prison health care facilities, and last year it implemented Brown's realignment plan: reducing prison populations by keeping lesser offenders in county facilities or on parole and, theoretically at least, strengthening drug abuse and other programs to cut down on recidivism.

The courts ruled June 20 that it isn't enough and ordered another 9,600 inmates to be released. But most of the nonviolent, low-risk prisoners are already gone. Nearly 90 percent of the current prisoners are there for serious or violent felonies.

At some point, Brown will have to release as many nonviolent offenders as he can find. But now is the time to adopt a smarter approach to crime along the lines of programs pioneered by Attorney General Kamala Harris while district attorney in San Francisco.

Harris developed strategies to keep kids in school and find jobs for young men at risk of turning criminal. She also created job opportunities for people released from prison. Over time these strategies will cost taxpayers less and reduce crime. But they are not simplistic. They require patience.

The alternative is to accept California's current recidivism rate of 65.1 percent, which remains the highest in the nation, and spending more on prisons. This is the path Maldonado and other lock-'em-up zealots choose.

The governor threatens to appeal the latest court order to the U.S. Supreme Court. Why delay the inevitable? California needs to own up to its responsibility to end cruel and unusual punishment and focus instead on strategies to divert people from a life of crime to productive lives.